I downloaded the current version of boost from here: http://www.boost.org/users/download/ (the Unix tgz)

Then I religiously followed these instructions:
http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_61_0/more/getting_started/unix-variants.html#easy-build-and-install

It didn't install much of anything useful...just stuff in /usr/local/share/boost-build, apparently the build system. No headers were installed, no libs were built or installed...

I tried to install from debian packages and that failed miserably too but that's another story...

Help please?